


We Were Graced as Dust

by mytimehaspassed



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, M/M, Murder, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:18:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The District comes alive with music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Were Graced as Dust

**WE WERE GRACED AS DUST**  
BAND OF BROTHERS  
Roe/Babe  
 **WARNINGS** : Serial killer!Roe AU; graphic depictions of violence and murder; blatant abuse of Christianity; mention of war.  
 **NOTES** : [Colbertesque](http://colbertesque.tumblr.com) asked for a serial killing Roe who hunts down prostitutes in an early 1900s [Storyville](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyville) because God asks him to do it. So this isn't my fault? :D

  
**I.**

The District comes alive with music.

***

In a room at one of the old houses, Roe had left a girl dying inside, her wet mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Her dress had stuck to her skin in red, damp spots, where Roe had pushed his knife in and then slid it back out again, scissoring her internal organs, cracking her ribs, watching her skin peel cleanly away from the bone inside.

She had been his first. The first woman he had ever paid for, he had ever killed, as a gesture, as a testament to the God he hears inside of him.

She had been pretty, underneath the dirt and the thin clothes that she wore, that Roe could see through in even the barest hint of light, her pale skin and the long arch of her neck as she turned back to take his hand, to pull him inside her room. She had been beautiful and alive and she had slipped the straps of her dress down her freckled shoulders, her mouth red and shining in the light of her room, smiling, her eyes hungry for his touch, and Roe had heard Him quite plainly, quite loudly, screaming for him to kill.

And he had.

***

His grandmother had been a traiteur, as her father before her.

She had taught him how to heal, and how to speak to God, and Roe had listened because he was nothing if not obedient. “Like this,” she would tell him, guiding his hands to a man, a woman, a child lying prostate on her living room table, oak and solid and dripping with blood.

She would push his hands over the wound or sore or trouble and she would tell him to concentrate, speaking to him in her lilting French, her voice not much louder than a whisper. “Right here,” she would say, and Roe would push his hand down and believe, believe that he could heal with nothing more than his touch, and the patient beneath him would tremble with the light of God, tremble with the faith flowing from his hands.

***

God doesn’t ask him to use his healing hands.

God asks him to kill.

 

**II.**

God speaks to him as He spoke to his grandmother before him.

He asks him to kill, and to kill well, and Roe obeys because he is nothing if not a soldier, hunting the houses in Storyville for the women whose skirts easily slip off, the tantalizing tease of peach fuzz dotting ankles and wrists, the belts and garters, and the women who smile lazily at his hungry eyes, pulling up their hair so he can kiss the base of their necks, the knob of their spines there.

He carries blue books in his pockets, and coins, coins that jingle together and speak of the price that he is willing to pay. The women look at him as they look at the men before him, the men who come and whisper French into their ears, their hands large and warm around their waists, cupping their breasts, sliding slick inside of them.

The women that look at him as if he is only ordinary and not touched by God, as his grandmother used to tell him when he was young, her aging hands over his, wrinkled and rough.

***

Roe kills almost as cleanly as he will one day heal on the battlefield, his knife sliding in deep, his palms clenched and stained with foreign blood, effortless French tumbling past his lips.

He kills as God tells him to kill, with no remorse.

 

**III.**

He meets the boy under the red lights of Storyville, when a woman passes a hand over Roe’s shoulders in a teasing touch, her lips pink and swollen, her eyes bright blue, and tells the boy to sit next to him, tells him in her accented voice to show Roe a good time.

Roe doesn’t say anything, his fingers tight on the coins in his pocket, but when the boy slides his hands warm up Roe’s legs, he smiles and asks how much.

The boy tells him that his name is Edward, but that they call him Babe here, his mouth hovering over the place where Roe’s neck meets his shoulder, his mouth wet, his lips quivering under Roe’s touch. He doesn’t ask Roe what he wants, like the more experienced girls do, their fingers inching the fabric of their skirts slowly, slowly up their thighs, but instead lets Roe guide his hands, his legs, lets him take control.

Roe fucks him quick, hard, against the wall of the room, his teeth biting Babe’s shoulder until it starts to bleed.

***

God doesn’t speak to him that night, doesn’t ask him to kill Babe the same way he killed the women, and Roe pays him for the night, sleeps until Babe shakes him awake the next morning, Roe’s mouth curled delicately on Babe’s white pillow.

***

He starts to see him regularly between kills, starts to see him for more than the occasional fuck, curling together on Babe’s bed under the hot, sticky Louisiana sun, Babe’s skin flush beneath Roe’s curious fingers, and Roe asks him why he’s so far away from home, the strange accent that Babe has been carrying since they met, different from the girls downstairs, who cheer and laugh and flaunt their riches at each passing man.

Babe doesn’t look at Roe when he shrugs, and he says, in a rich, warm voice, that he came to New Orleans for a friend, who gambled his life away in a game Babe had never played. Roe knows what that means, knows the intricacies of unpaid debts, and doesn’t ask him if that’s how Babe found himself working in a brothel for less than what he was worth.

Roe kisses his freckled shoulder, kisses Babe’s cheekbone, and Babe rolls over and devours Roe’s mouth with his, and Roe’s fingers roam down Babe’s back, curve lower and lower, and Babe tells him that Roe doesn’t have to feel sorry for him, doesn’t have to show him any pity, because God is giving him exactly what he deserves.

And Roe pulls back, but only to say, “I know.”

 

**IV.**

An angel comes to him in his dreams.

He is wounded when she comes, her warm light basking him softly at first and then blindingly bright, reaching down and picking him up from where he lay, soldiers dotted all around him, their metal helmets and mewling mouths and bright red bursts of blood, and she places her red lips on his and wraps them both in her fluttering, strong wings.

She is beautiful and he is weak below her, his hands shaking over the hole in his chest, and she tells him that he has done such a brilliant job with the women that he has killed, the women that he has left in Storyville, his love for God like the love he feels for the battlefield. She tells him that God is proud, that God is waiting for him with his arms outstretched, and she tells him that the brothers he has made here, the ones who will die in the trenches, will follow him up and up and up.

She smiles and Roe smiles weakly beneath her, and when she leans back down to kiss him one last time, he wakes up.

***

He doesn’t touch them, the women who cry when he shows them his knife. God doesn’t ask him to touch them, so he doesn’t, carefully slipping their dresses back on after he’s stabbed and sliced and taken the time to watch them take the careful, slow sips of their last breaths, their chests moving up and down and up and down one last time.

God never asks him to touch them, so he doesn’t, washes them of the blood and traces of other men’s semen with the rags they keep beside their beds, the bowls of water on the vanity. He kisses them when they’re clean, kisses them soft, chaste, on their foreheads and wishes them well in the afterlife, stroking their curls with a broad, calloused hand.

They are unspoiled when he sends them to their God, and God praises him for it.

 

**V.**

He goes to war.

***

There are no women on the battlefield, but the towns he visits have the same depravities as New Orleans, and it’s two wrong turns before he’s in a red light district with chattering, cheerful women who coo over his uniform, their voluptuous bodies and foreign words.

It’s easy to kill in Europe, as easy as it is in the United States, and between the trenches and the short bursts of ammunition and the healing hands he places on the soldiers in his care, praying over them in guttural French, praying to a God who speaks more to him than the men he saves daily, God tells him to kill and to kill well.

***

He does.


End file.
